I Learned How to Cook a Turkey

and thanks Mom for the cooking tips... er staying on the phone for almost the entire time...

Happy Thanksgiving from Corpus Christi and no, even though I am in Texas, I did not shoot the Turkey that I cooked myself. A few of us who were stranded in this strange land gathered at my place and we made a pretty good meal (for only $38!!... who knew?) while watching football and movies. It wasn't as good as being home or as good as that one I spent in DC a couple years back, but it was good.

As for flight school, (which is what we're all about here), things are going pretty smoothly. I passed my aircraft systems test (with a 100%), the weather test and the emergency procedure test. All three of these are designed to test our general knowledge of the subject, so I am definitely not done learning about them. Not only that, but when it comes to actually flying with an instructor, I'll have to know everything pretty much cold because he (or she) is going to quiz me throughout the event.
In fact, when I'm done writing this I'm going to go back to studying my normal and emergency procedures for the simulator events coming up this week.
Cockpit Procedure Training (or Trainers..?), CPTs for short, are the next challenge which I will face and hopefully the last real hurdle before I can actually strap into the cockpit of a real plane in a couple weeks. The CPT is a mock cockpit mounted on gimbals in a big dark room full of similar simulators. The instructor, a civilian contractor, usally an ex-pilot veteran of Korea or Vietnam, sits right next to the cockpit (on solid ground) surrounded by a bank of 1980s-era computers. Unlike what you would expect, these simulators are not visual and you cannot see anything outside of the cockpit. Their purpose is to train us how to read and use the instruments and controls located in the cockpit. They will give us emergencies either through aural cues or through readings on our instruments and we will be graded on how we react to and handle the emergency.
I'm thinking that it's going to be a more complicated version of an arcade video game and I'm hoping that it'll be just as fun. However, I hear that it's a pretty intense experience and that depending on the instructor, mistakes are not easily tolerated.

If I can remember I'll try to bring my camera into the building when I go. In the meantime in addition to memorizing my procedures I've been going to the flight line (the part of the airfield where the planes are parked outside and where the hangars are) and practicing doing a pre-flight inspection. It's actually kind of fun, the maintanence people leave a broken plane (the current one is missing a navigation radio) tied up outside for us to practice on. We can climb all over it, sit in the cockpit, make airplane noises, look inside the engine, crawl underneath, put our head in the gearwell or the avionics bay/luggage compartment. I went yesterday and I was going to go today, but it's raining.
It's strange there is so much for me to memorize but it's not entirely clear how much time I have to learn it all and in what order I should.

The Army-Navy game is next weekend (on CBS)... this will be the first one in five years which I haven't attended. I'm kind of excited to not be so incredibly cold for the whole day, but at the same time ... no I'm pretty glad to not have to be there. I'll miss the fun parts and the parties afterwards, but I'll definitely be watching with my friends here from the comfort of my futon (thanks Aunt Nancy), bar or O-Club and it'll be good to see another Navy win.